Joined-up government has featured prominently in the New Labour agenda. However, the politics of joining-up remain under-explored, with disproportionate emphasis on the technical and managerial dimensions of the challenge. ...

The challenge of enhancing the ‘democratic anchorage’ of partnerships has become a central concern in policy studies. Radical reform proposals designed to level the deliberative playing field include community veto powers ...

Influential governance theories argue that we live increasingly in a world of networks, either relegating hierarchy to the shadows or dismissing it altogether. This paper develops a Gramscian critique of these currents, ...

This study compares and contrasts urban regeneration partnerships in the UK with urban regimes in the USA. It is argued that regime theory, as developed by Elkin and Stone, neither describes nor explains the contrasting ...

Foucauldian and neo-Gramscian approaches enjoy considerable influence in research on the mutations of neoliberal governance in cities. However, both are prone to treating coercion as the antithesis of power, leading them ...

When political science first emerged as a social scientific discipline in the early 1900s scholars tended to study the political world by carefully describing the legal and formal structures that defined the state. At ...

“Does politics matter” is an enduring question in urban studies. This paper contributes to the debate by exploring the agency of city leaders in local economic development policy in Johannesburg (South Africa) and Leeds ...

Over the past 10 years, urban regime theory has become the dominant paradigm for studying urban politics in liberal democracies. Yet there is disagreement about how far it can help us to understand urban political processes. ...